Review: ASCII Sector

I always figured the only reason I'd ever come on here would be to complain, but I figure if I can review something that's awesome in a Samcastic way, that can count too, right? Anyway, I've found what's quite possibly one of the best games to kill a few minutes with... or an hour or two: Privateer: ASCII Sector.

ASCII Sector is awesome for lots of reasons. One, it's a remake of a game from one of my ffavorite game series ever, Wing Commander. In Wing Commander, and in the original Privateer, you'd go around in a space ship and shoot things, usually these cat alien guys. ALIENS THAT ARE CATS. I think we can all agree that having a furry biped that walks around SHREDDING PEOPLE TO PIECES with their claws is just AWESOME, and ASCII Sector has that too (although they usually prefer to just shoot you).

Second, you can do pretty much whatever you want. My first time around, I ran some odd jobs for people in my piece of crap freighter, delivering messages like "Your baby is red" for low amounts of money. Then eventually I got a fighter and started shooting people to death! That got a little boring, but mainly because it just wasn't mean enough. So I started another save file and practiced firing with a rifle. I landed on a space station and shot everyone, one by one, taking all their money and lifting off again. What was my punishment? About 30 days of not being allowed to come back, and a criminal record with about 10 murders or so. (And I still wasn't a wanted man, except on that base.)

So then I landed on a planet, and tried killing everyone there, but five police officers and some angry civilians shot me dead. So I got bored, reloaded and tried injecting some random stuff into myself- stuff I'd found on one of the bodies from the last base. Suddenly I was moving TWICE AS FAST AS ANYONE ELSE! So I holed myself up in a building and started shooting people again. A police officer with a kevlar vest and a helmet came to try and shoot me and I shot him in the arm twice, making him drop his pistol. I did this to a bunch more people and before I knew it every last single person on this planet is dead, and I can take ALL of their stuff. So I stole all of their money and weapons and put it on my ship, and ASCII Sector let me do it for being so awesome.

On that day I discovered something- doing drugs really does give you a benefit, and crime not only pays, it pays extremely well. For my several dozen counts of murder, my only punishment was a huge load of fines and being banned for 255 days from that planet. So in a year, I could come back and repeat the whole process! Man, am I awesome or what? Of course I'm awesome, and so too is ASCII Sector for letting me do this.

Oh, you know what else makes this game so awesome? The graphics! Check them out:

http://www.asciisector.net/screenshots/

Those of you who went to the link are now saying things like "But we've had better graphics since the 80s!" No, idiot, modern graphics are what's WRONG with gaming, not what's great about it. When I play ASCII Sector, I have no choice but to use my imagination to fill in the blanks. ASCII Sector's graphics and what happens within are as awesome as your imagination. Sure, in Halo you can see some blood, you can witness the body go flying, but in ASCII Sector I'm doing backflips while shooting people between the eyes with my rifle, and then break dancing before I pop off a shot into your leg, as far as you can tell. And since I'm awesome, you know that's exactly what I'm doing. Depending on your intrepretation, making a guy's arm useless could mean it's too injured to hold a weapon, or you can picture someone losing their entire arm due to three simple shots with a rifle. I don't think I need to tell you what's going on when I play this game.

Bottom line, if you play games at all, you have no excuse not to try this game, because it's free, and it's awesome. Download it, you lazy bum.

http://www.asciisector.net/download/